Sounds from the Past affecting the Future

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LOVE

Love is an alternate state of awareness. Sometimes, it is even a paranormal phenomenon. Mystics of many spiritual traditions say that universal love is the essence of their transcendental revelations.

People who survive close calls and relate profound near-death experiences agree that love is what life is all about. In panoramic memory visions, they revisit every detail of their lives in full color, holographic reality. As each event unfolds, they relive it through the eyes and feelings of those with whom they interacted during the event. In the closing moments of our lives we become fully and acutely aware of the effects of our every action on others. What better, more memorable way to understand the truepower of love?

Over the years, I have been privileged to interview people individually or as couples, who believe they had supernatural foreknowledge of the identities of their mates-to-be, even before they met them. Sometimes, this knowledge came in a dream, at other times, it was revealed in an instant of awareness, or as a vivid mental image or a knowing feeling. Later, sometimes years later, the image materialized just as they had foreseen or felt it.

The phenomenon of love at first sight may make some people believe that they knew their mates before, in a previous existence. Such experiences give rise to the now familiar notion of “soul-mates and life-mates.” It is best not to go overboard interpreting these uncanny manifestations of love. After all, such “soul-mate” relationships can and do go sour too, just as do relationships that began under less unusual circumstances. Soul-mate relationships are a learning experience, while a Life-mate experience is a very mutually rewarding experience.

Still, the seemingly paranormal aspects of love are part and parcel of what it is to be a human being and, as such, they are deserving of serious investigation. We should not be deterred from inquiring into love because of the immense difficulties of studying it scientifically. Many great creative minds have written much that is worthwhile about love from philosophical, historical, or literary perspectives. In our Alternate States of Consciousness course this semester love is one of the many mysterious states of awareness we are exploring.



25 Ways a Woman Can Superglue
Her Marriage

Make your husband fall in love with you all over again.
What exactly is the anatomy for keeping romance alive? Check your attitude. Accept and appreciate the many differences between men and women. Be very clear about what you need. Here are Gray's 25 ways to keep your love glowing and growing.
1. When he compliments you, don't be demure, and worse yet, don't disagree. Smile and tell him you appreciate it.
2. Tuck a picture of him in your wallet. Show him. Update it once a year. Show him again.
3. Don't ask him if you are gaining weight. And avoid self put-downs like "I'm getting fat." Feeling confident about yourself makes you sexy.
4. Shower him with thank-you's. Often. Even if he does something around the house week in and week out as a regular chore. Sure, you're both responsible grown-ups. And it's just as sure that this kind of flattery will get you everywhere.
5. If he's on a low-fat or low-cholesterol diet, seek out recipes his doctor would approve of. This says you care enough to make the extra effort. Then, after your culinary cartwheels, if he gobbles up a whole bag of chips or cookies, don't mention it. He knows he acted like a child. He doesn't need you to be his mother.
6. If he's driving, don't give unsolicited advice in the car unless you're in labor!
7. When he drops crumbs on the counter or socks on the floor, pause before commenting. First, consider, "Am I about to launch a negative remark?" Men cannot connect with their wives when they're being corrected. Second, prioritize what's really important enough for you to make a fuss over.

Thousands are drawn to Bay doctor believing that he heals with prayer
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Sarah Crump and David Briggs
Plain Dealer Reporters
The sick and desperate come by the thousands because they have heard stories of miracles.
They line up for hours at Cleveland Catholic church altars for the touch of a 50-year-old Bay Village man who says that from the time he was a boy, he knew he would do something great for God.
Dr. Issam Nemeh is not surprised by the turnout.
"Even as a small child, I saw thousands coming," he said in short, quiet phrases that carry the accent of his native Damascus, Syria.
"I always knew this was my calling."
Nemeh (pronounced Name-y) will minister tonight at a healing service that begins at 9 at St. Bernadette Church in Westlake.
Who is this balding father of four who says he wants to help God heal people physically and spiritually before he achieves his goal - "to die for Jesus"?
He rejects the label of faith healer.
"The only healer is the Holy Spirit," Nemeh told The Plain Dealer in his first public interview. He says he is nothing special, that anyone can be an instrument of God's healing.
"I offered up my life to God in total surrender. When I say, 'your will be done,' I mean it fully," he said.
Nemeh is an acupuncturist with a modest office in Rocky River who charges his patients $250 per office visit. In his healing ministry, he says, he takes no offerings at services. Church officials don't know of him taking offerings.
He is also a physician who does not practice. Nemeh holds medical licenses with a specialty in anesthesiology in Ohio and Illinois.
Nemeh uses no needles in his acupuncture. He guides a painless electrical stimulation device along his patients' bodies, but his chief instrument is prayer.
"I pray over every one," he said.
Dr. Scott Frank, who teaches a course in faith, religion and medicine at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, said a large body of research shows a positive relationship between health and religion. But no scholarly study proves single-event services cause long-term healing, and many diseases can have spontaneous remissions.
Church and medical officials agree that faith should not be a substitute for medical attention. Diocesan officials say suffering is a theological mystery and that people who are not healed should not think it was because they lacked sufficient faith.
Nemeh graduated in 1980 from a medical school in Zabrze, Poland. From 1995 to 1999, he was part of a now-disbanded alternative medicine program at Southwest General Health Center in Middleburg Heights.
Before that, Nemeh said, he served for several years as an anesthesiologist at Richmond Heights Hospital. Neither the hospital nor University Hospitals Health System, which now owns it, could locate records to confirm or deny that.
Word of Nemeh began spreading through the Cleveland Catholic community five years ago as he began participating in small healing services. Spurred on by recent television reports, the services have grown. Organizers said that on March 12 at SS. Peter & Paul Church in Garfield Heights, they turned away about 7,000.
"We never discussed having Masses. These things came by themselves," said Nemeh, who ministers with his wife, Cathy, 48; Sister Monica Marie Navin of the Sisters of the Incarnate Word in Parma Heights; and with priests, including the Rev. Robert J. Welsh, former president of St. Ignatius High School.
Daniel Stancu of Medina, once paralyzed, said he is a walking miracle, in part because Nemeh prayed over him. Stancu's primary-care physician agrees.
Stancu, 23, said a vertebra in his neck was shattered and two others were damaged in a car accident when he was 19. He said he lost the use of his arms and legs and steered his wheelchair by puffing into a tube.
Dr. Olga Kovacevic, who treated Stancu once before the accident, saw him after his injury on Jan. 26, 2001, just after his hospital release. "I thought, wow. The chances of this young man ever walking again are almost none," she said.
Nemeh treated Stancu in his office with electrical device and prayer.
"Almost instantaneously, I had feeling in my arms and my legs," Stancu said. He returned to Nemeh several dozen times for treatments over the next two years. He walks with a crutch now, and said he frequently walks in private without assistance of any kind.
Can he pin his success on Nemeh's touch? "I think he played a pretty big role in my recovery," said Stancu.
Kovacevic, however, is convinced that Stancu was healed by faith. "God along with Dr. Nemeh restored his ability to walk," she said.
The Catholic Diocese of Cleveland, while careful not to authenticate or deny any healing attributed to him, has taken a generally positive approach to his ministry.
Bishop Anthony M. Pilla, who attended a healing service in February at St. Ignatius High School, said Nemeh and his healing team have acted appropriately, forgoing sensationalism or personal rewards. "They are just doing this as part of their faith commitment and their belief that God can heal . . . and that every person can be an instrument of that healing if you want to commit yourself to it," Pilla said in a statement released by the diocese.
Auxiliary Bishop Roger Gries encourages Catholics to come to the healing services with the "anticipation God is going to touch them in whatever way God deems it appropriate."
Crowds like the one at SS. Peter & Paul are only the beginning, Nemeh insists.
"It will start here." And it will grow. "This country will become a stronghold of Christianity," said Nemeh. Eventually, "it will be all over the world."
News research director Patti Graziano and reporter Bill Lubinger contributed to this report.
To reach these reporters:
scrump@plaind.com, 216-999-5478 and dbriggs@plaind.com, 216-999-4812.


Who's Afraid of Gender Selection?
Canada is poised to ban proven technologies for choosing children's sex. If this is how we treat sex selection on the eve of human genetic redesign, we have a really long way to go
By George Dvorsky
Betterhumans Staff
4/28/2003 7:53 AM



Several years ago, good friends of mine were desperate to conceive a girl. To improve the odds, they tried what is known as the Shettles Method.
This method, developed by Landrum Shettles, suggests that the timing and position of intercourse can help couples determine a baby's gender.
Shettles notes that the X-bearing (female) sperm are hardier and slower moving than the Y-bearing (male) sperm. Accordingly, he proposes that couples who want a girl should have sex two or more days before ovulation. The reasoning is that when the egg finally arrives, there's an increased chance that only the female sperm will be around to fertilize it.
Additionally, because X sperm are more resilient than Y sperm, Shettles recommends that couples use the missionary position to keep sperm further away from the cervix. He also suggests that women avoid having an orgasm, as it increases the alkaline secretions that tend to favour Y sperm. (Sorry ladies.)
Couples the world-over have tried the Shettles Method and countless other techniques to exert at least some control over the sex of their offspring. And for as long as women have been making babies, they have been exchanging ideas about how to conceive a boy or a girl.
Shettles claims that his technique tips the odds of any one gender from 50% to 75%. Using the technique, my friends did in fact conceive a girl, and were absolutely delighted. Many experts dismiss the practice, however, claming that it does nothing to improve the odds.
More sophisticated technologies available at fertility clinics, such as the Albumin or MicroSort sperm separation methods, undoubtedly do. Clinical gender selection finally offers couples the chance to definitively decide the gender of their offspring without having to rely on untrustworthy techniques.
But despite the fact that they build on a long tradition and that a strong demand exists for them, gender selection technologies may be illegal if you live in a country such as Canada. Thanks to Health Minister Anne McLellan and the federal Liberal party, Canada is on the verge of seeing Bill C-13 -- the so-called "Assisted Human Reproduction Act" -- voted into law, effectively criminalizing clinical gender selection.
Yes, that's correct: Offering couples a proven means of choosing the sex of their children is soon to become a codified criminal offense in Canada, while unproven means will remain legal.
It's unbelievable. Gender selection is perhaps the most straightforward and harmless assistive reproductive procedure around. Should Bill C-13 be voted into law, it would represent a significant setback in the struggle to see germinal choice technologies receive social and political sanction.
Moreover, attempts to criminalize this and other viable reproductive options expose the irrational stubbornness and rampant ignorance that is so characteristic of biofundamentalism in both Canada and the United States. If our politicians can't get their heads around something as elementary and clear-cut as the right to choose the gender of offspring, what does it say about the potential for more significant germinal choice technologies and human re-engineering?
The ethics of gender selection
There are virtually no good arguments for opposing gender selection, making the current resistance to it all the more unfathomable.
James Grifo, president-elect of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology and a reproductive endocrinologist, argues that "sex selection is sex discrimination," and has labeled it an unethical practice. "It's not ethical to take someone off the street and help them have a boy or a girl," says Grifo.
Like Grifo, many people are concerned that sex selection will result in possible sex ratio imbalances in the future, such as the ones that currently exist in China and India.
Others believe that gender selection imposes psychological harm to the sex-selected offspring by imposing unrealistic expectations upon them.
And yet others warn of increased marital conflict over gender selection decisions and a strengthening of gender bias in society as a whole.
"What's the next step?" asks William Schoolcraft of the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine in Englewood, and a supporter of Grifo. "As we learn more about genetics," asks Schoolcraft, "do we reject kids who do not have superior intelligence or who don't have the right color hair or eyes?"
Unfounded and unrealistic fears
Opponents of sex selection are essentially singing the tired old tune of slippery slopeism. They basically argue that once parents start choosing the characteristics of their offspring, discrimination against those who aren't "perfect" will soon follow.
How this catastrophic breakdown of civil rights is supposed to happen in our progressively cosmopolitan and tolerant liberal democracies is never elucidated. I simply don't buy the argument that increased reproductive options will cause society to regress back into 19th century mentalities.
As for the argument about sex ratio imbalances, I'm not particularly worried. First, most couples in the West -- those countries that tend to have tolerant people with enlightened perspectives on gender and race -- simply want sex selection for what is known as "family balancing." Many couples simply want two kids: A boy and a girl.
My grandmother produced four girls before she delivered a baby boy for my hopeful grandfather. While I love my aunts dearly, the keep-having-babies-until-you-get-the-one-you-want method seems rather excessive and unnecessary.
Also, the number of couples who choose to use clinical gender selection may turn out to be insignificant in reference to the six billion occupants of Earth. It simply won't result in any statistically significant change to the global sex ratio.
In the odd chance that sex selection does have an impact on gender ratios, the government could always step in and offer tax breaks to couples who choose to have children of the less-present gender.
And finally, the argument that premeditated characteristics cause parents to impose lofty expectations on their children is nonsense. Since time immemorial parents have imposed their own expectations upon their children. (Not to mention those stories of mothers dressing their little boys in dresses.) This would appear to be an issue of parenting skills and not reproductive rights.
Simply put, gender selection causes no harm to anyone. And in fact, it may produce the opposite effect. Take my friends who wanted a baby girl, for example; while they would have welcomed a boy with open arms, once their expectations and hopes had been established, a second boy for them would have been a mixed blessing.
Redesigning humans
Opponents of sex selection don't have a foot to stand on, and this bodes well for the advent of germinal choice technologies.
Many arguments used against sex selection are used against genetic engineering, human cloning and other pending reproductive innovations.
Yes, some people want to choose the gender of their offspring. Yes, some people are going to want to choose the physical and cognitive characteristics of their children.
And no, contrary to hysterical belief, once these procedures are perfected, they will not harm children; no, society will not breakdown as the next generation of humans become healthier, stronger, smarter and happier.
Nor will society collapse as we progressively endow parents with greater biological autonomy and reproductive control.
Stay out of our bedrooms
In 1967, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau famously said that "there is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation." While Trudeau was speaking about legalizing homosexuality, the spirit of his statement has been broadened by many Canadians to include not just sexual freedoms, but reproductive freedoms as well.
Unfortunately, Trudeau's Liberal party descendants have chosen to ignore his words and dismiss the brave path that he began forging over 30 years ago. Instead, Anne McLellan and the Liberals want to join Canadian couples in their bedrooms and snuggle up right between them. And this for no good reason, aside from the government's misguided patriarchal proclivities.
Here in Canada we are witnessing the Feds slip Bill C-13 by a largely unaware Canadian public. And by virtue of this ambivalence, Canadian couples are in effect opening the bedroom doors for the government to come right in.
But of course, we don't have to tolerate this. That's why elections were invented.
People of all nations should be wary of any attempt by their government to intervene and control their reproductive privileges and bodily sovereignty.
Gender selection is under attack, and citizens in democratic countries must fight back with government selection. If they restrict your reproductive rights, send them packing.
My interest was aroused in the mid 70’s as I was reading about the attempt of Canadian and French racing to use nutrition to make the female body more or less acid or alkaline in order to conceive a male or female child. They failed to note the results giving them 85 percent chance was the same as the Astrologist claim to using the male/female concept of the signs as being useful in achieving the same since it also gave them a 85 percent chance. I looked closely at it and decided that what they had overlooked was that the moon’s position in relation to the sun in the birth chart was useful in calculation of the woman’s fertility. Watching the approaching moon and realizing that she would be fertile within a said amount of hours prior and afterward, looking at the moons position relative to the sign being in a male or female sign, I then calculated the time in which it would be in the desired sign while she was fertile. This was collaborated with scientist from Alexandra, Virginia. They desired a male child and the result was a male child in the sign of Gemini. I have had a female and a male child in that order to protect the boy from the demon, a female is required as first born. That was calculated to the minute. The result was more than I would have thought to achieve as the language capability of the female was as I had considered. The musical side was also beyond my ideal. She has attended Bu for 4 years, NYU for two and is due to be in Rochester for her doctorate at 23. The boy was born with the signs similar to mine and to the 1 degree of Pisces Rising and Sun in Cancer. Oh Yes! Just a thought I did emphasize that the woman change her diet accordingly to bring her to a alkaline or acid environment within the vagina so that the sperm would be able to travel accordingly…etc., the two methods were documented in the mid 70’s and entered in the medical journals, regardless of what other writers have written in books claiming the acid/alkaline value was the key, it was only half the key! The remaining untold portion of the key was in the hands of the astrologist. Neither was able to put it together as I did!!!—Michael Ramirez